Critical Essay by Sigmund Freud

In the following essay, originally published in German in 1910, Freud applies his methods of psychoanalytic investigation to Leonardo's writings. He makes controversial assertions regarding events in Leonardo's childhood and their effect on his later life, maintaining that evidence points to the artist's homosexuality and the sublimation of his sexual urges into his art.

One

When psychoanalytic investigation, which usually contents itself with frail human material, approaches the great personages of humanity, it is not impelled to it by motives which are often imputed to it by laymen. It does not strive “to blacken the radiant and to drag the sublime into the mire”; it finds no satisfaction in diminishing the distance between the perfection of the great and the...